Week 2 - Project Introduction/ Ideas

We spent most of today thinking of ideas for our project, discussing them together at the end of the day.

The notes I made were pretty jumbled but here is a summary of my group's thoughts:

• Social media has powerful effects on society, the environment, the body, and perhaps most importantly, communication.
• How and what we communicate is being radically reformed by pre-formatted social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs like this one. This means everyone is equipped to create media for consumption. 
• Visual communicators (such as illustrators) need to critically approach these environments and question social media as a responsible and critical communicator.

We need to think: WHAT will I post? WHY?

What content could we take from these spaces and reconfigure? How many times? What will the future implications be?

"Choice of media/process must be carefully and conceptually considered."

Here are some possibilities I had for my actual project, in light of these ideas:

I could look at the way people no longer use write letters, buy CDs or shop in supermarkets. How photo albums, recipe books, TVs, libraries etc are becoming obsolete.
What is happening to all these endangered technologies? I am imagining a preservation society website (or even graveyard) for them, which could be quite humorous. It would be ironic to create and broadcast this concept online, as the internet is what has destroyed them.

I could investigate if 'social' media is in fact quashing our social abilities and turning us into lonely, awkward beings with no real-world interaction skills.
My starting point and tagline would be 'I love you... Tube', which lends itself to my outcome perhaps being film or animation.

My 3rd idea is to imagine if people in past eras had been able to use the internet, and how it would have affected them. This too, could be quite humorous. This idea comes partly from 'Horrible Histories' which has sketches in which past monarchs using online dating and creating their own software.

See also: Cleopatra and Marc Anthony

I'll think about these ideas in more depth and choose one to research and develop.